"His legal
backsliding generated a catastrophic moral regression in the society of our
northern neighbor, sparking a weakening of ethical and humanitarian standards
and encouraging public officials to maintain that torture is acceptable."

The relief provoked by the news of Alberto Gonzales' resignation
from the U.S. Department of Justice is insufficient to overcome the tremendous
destruction wrought by that public official on our neighbor to the north's
system of justice, on individual liberties and guarantees, and on the cause
human rights. First, as legal counsel to George W. Bush and later as Attorney
General, Gonzales - the first U.S. citizen of Mexican
origin to hold that position - engineered the biggest rollback of the
institutional protections and democracy in that country in decades, and it will
take much time and legislative work to repair the vast legal regression he has
caused.

Certainly Gonzales didn't act alone, nor does the fundamental
responsibility for the grave legal distortions introduced during the Bush
Government correspond only to him. Simply put, he was the executor of the group
of fanatical neoconservatives that had taken control of the superpower's levers
of power - and by extension the world - after the contested U.S. election in
2000.

One must keep in mind that as a presidential advisor, the now
outgoing Attorney General played a major role in elaborating the legal
regression called the “war against terrorism,” launched by Bush after the attacks
of September 11th, 2001. This regression took its most deplorable expression in
the so-called Patriot Act , approved by
Congress in October of that year, all within the context of the hysteria
generated by the attacks on the TwinTowers and the Pentagon.
That document legalized, among other things, spying on U.S. citizens without a
warrant, the illegal searches of homes, and - if thought to be suspicious in
the eyes of the authorities - the indefinite detention of foreigners without
providing them with legal counsel. In addition to promoting that legislation,
Gonzales drew up a document [Executive
Order 13233] in which he
recommended ignoring the directives of the Geneva Conventions on the matter of prisoners of war, with the
purpose of giving the military and U.S. public officials wide latitude to
mistreat those captured and put them under “moderate” torture.

This and similar kinds of legal backsliding have generated a
catastrophic moral regression in the society of our northern neighbor, sparking
a weakening of ethical and humanitarian standards and encouraging public
officials and opinion leaders to maintain that if inflicted on terrorists -
torture is acceptable. Because of these acts, a repressive and barbaric climate
eventually translated in the atrocities perpetrated at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo
Bay and other detention centers operated by the U.S. armed forces, as well as
the creation of a vast government network dedicated to the kidnapping, aerial
transport and torture of uncounted terrorist suspects in Europe, Asia and
Africa.

With this record Gonzales arrived at the Justice Department in
February 2005, exercising his duties with a clear sense of partisanship and in
a spirit of complete submission to Bush. During his management, the FBI was
accused of applying the Patriot Act in an abusive and illegal manner, and the
Department of Justice became a gigantic front for masking the shady behavior of
the president and vice president. One incident that brought into bold relief,
the authoritarian and dictatorial mentality of Gonzales, was his declaration
that in the United States, habeas corpus falls
outside constitutional protections - an opinion that scandalized jurists of the
neighboring country.

[Editor's Note: The
writ of habeas corpusis the name of a legal
action through which a person can seek relief from the unlawful detention of
themselves or another person. Its Western origins go back to the 13thcentury
and until the Bush Administration, questioning its constitutional effectiveness
was nearly unthinkable ].

The straw that broke the camel's back was the dismissal of eight federal
prosecutors who had been observed to be impartial and non-partisan, only to be
replaced by Bush and Republican Party loyalists. This action put Gonzales in
the sights of the Capitol [Congress] and forced him to testify before
legislative committees, which resulted in an overwhelming loss of the Attorney
General's credibility. As has occurred with other Bush collaborators - Donald
Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and John Bolton - the President clung to his position
far beyond what political decency and personal dignity would advise.

While Bush is the person most responsible for the tragic
regression of individual liberties and guarantees in the United States and the
world - as far as this decade goes - Gonzales will be remembered as the
principal executor of that backward movement.